1. Field of Art
The disclosure generally relates to the field of mobile communications. In particular, the invention relates multi-prefix and interactive search capability on a mobile communications device.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the last few years, web-enabled mobile telephones have become enormously popular. More web-enabled mobile phones ship each year than do desktop and notebook computers combined. Such mobile phones are similar to desktop and mobile computers in that they offer display screens, a keyboard, and sometimes, a pointing device. However, because of portability requirements, the capabilities of the displays, keyboards, and pointers on mobile phones are significantly reduced. Displays are relatively small with little area to display content as well as menus, tool bars, and other navigation and status information. The keyboards are often telephone keypads or thumb keyboards. The pointer, when provided, is often a scroll wheel or joy stick that can be used to indicate a direction of movement or pressed to indicate a click. Sometimes, the pointer is simply a set of arrow keys on the keyboard. Furthermore, because of speed and latency issues, navigation between web pages is typically much slower on mobile phones than on desktop and notebook computers.
The human interface limitations of mobile phones, combined with slower navigation, cause significant changes in the ability of a user to interact with web pages. Additionally, because of limitations of the input devices, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) forms are difficult to use on mobile phones. The difficulties arise in many ways. The keyboard and the pointer are less effective than their counterparts on desktop and personal computers.
Keyboards are less effective because their small form factor makes it more difficult to type characters. In some case, the keyboard is smaller and has fewer keys. The smaller keyboards usually require thumbing: typing with ones thumbs rather than using ten fingers. The reduction in keys makes it more difficult to key in digits and special characters. Some keyboards are telephone dial pads with multiple letters on each key. Various technologies, including triple tap (pressing the same key until the desired letter appears) and predictive text, help to improve the effectiveness of such keyboards, but the effectiveness is still far below that of a full-size keyboard.
The pointer is also less effective. HTML forms often contain multiple input fields and the pointer is used to navigate among them. Pointers on mobile phones, when available, are less effective than pointers or mice used with desktop computers at navigating between the input fields. For example, tabbing between fields using a full-size keyboard enables the field for typing when it has received focus. On a mobile phone, the tabbing is typically done via a directional pad and the field has to subsequently be selected to be enabled for typing. Additionally, on desktop computers, mice can be used to move from one field to another without having to move through the fields in between. On mobile phones, the moving from one field to another is typically done sequentially from one field to the next, without the ability to skip any fields along the way.
The existing technology described above requires more effort to input commands for navigation and is very difficult and cumbersome to use.